1975-Fred Moore and Gordon French hold the first meeting of a new microcomputer
hobbyist's club in French's garage, in Menlo Park, California. 32 people
meet, including Bob Albrect, Steve Dompier, Lee Felsenstein, Bob Marsh,
Tom Pittman, Marty Spergel, Alan Baum, and Steven Wozniak. Bob Albrect
shows off an Altair, and Steve Dompier reports on MITS, and how they had
4000 orders for the Altair.
-Ed Roberts hires Paul Allen as director of software at MITS.

1976-Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs finish work on a computer circuit board,
that they call the Apple I computer.
-The First World Altair Computer Convention is held in Albuquerque,
New Mexico.
-Paul Terrell incorporates Byte, Inc.

1978-The Second West Coast Computer Fair is held, in San Jose, California.

1979-Zilog ships samples of the 16-bit Z-8000 processor.

1980-Atari ad: "Atari promises to be the most popular Personal Computer
System of the 1980's!".
-Microsoft Corp. announces its first hardware product, the Z-80 SoftCard
for the Apple II. This card gives the Apple II CP/M capability, contributing
greatly to Apple Computer's success. The card includes CP/M and Microsoft's
Disk BASIC, all for US$349. The announcement is made at the West Coast
Computer Faire in San Francisco. Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products
had built several prototypes before Microsoft's Don Burtis took over the
project. In its first year of release, 25,000 units are sold.
-Satellite Software International ships WordPerfect 1.0 for Data General
minicomputers.
-At the West Coast Computer Faire, Adam Osborne approaches Les Felsenstein
with the idea of starting a computer company.